Deathless

by Catherynne M. Valente

“I hardly know this boy.” Marya drank in the sight of her friend, and a dull ache began between her breasts. She must stop speaking to Lebedeva; she must stop—but she could not. “You hardly knew Koschei. Abduction is a marvelous icebreaker.”

“You will live as you live in any world,” Madame Lebedeva said. She reached out her hand as if to grasp Marya’s, as if to press it to her cheek, then closed her fingers, as if Marya’s hand were in hers. “With difficulty, and grief.”

“Why do you want to be a nurse, Kseniya Yefremovna?” “It is better than being a rusalka,” Kseniya said, shrugging. Marya wondered at the deliberation with which her friend dropped the word between them. “Why should I not want something better?” she went on. “Doesn’t everyone? Don’t you? The old order, it is good for the old. A farmer wants his son to be afraid of beautiful women, so that he will not leave home too soon, so he tells a story about how one drowned his brother’s cousin’s friend in a lake, not because he was a pig who deserved to be drowned, but because beautiful women are bad, and also witches. And it doesn’t matter that she didn’t ask to be beautiful, or to be born in a lake, or to live forever, or to not know how men breathe until they stop doing it. Well, I do not want to be beautiful, or a woman, or anything. I want to know how men breathe. I want my daughter to be in the Young Pioneers, and grow up to be something important, like a writer or an immunologist, to grow up not even knowing what a rusalka is, because then I will know her world does not in any way resemble one in which farmers tell their sons how bad beautiful women are.”

A war story is a black space. On the one side is before and on the other side is after, and what is inside belongs only to the dead.

Miserable means miserable. What can you do? You live through it, or you die. Living is best, but if you can’t live, well, life is like that, sometimes. So now I stop everything, and I say it is time for the dead to talk with the dead, and Zvonok has the floor, if there is a floor left to have.

Marya never cried. There was a switch in her, too, and it was also jammed.

“This is my house,” said Marya Morevna quietly. They were both wrong. It is my house. But I let them fight over it because he is a fool and she is a devil like me, and what is the world but a boxing ring where fools and devils put up their fists?

A ration card says, This much life we have allotted you. It says, This much death we can keep from your door. But no more. It says, In Leningrad there is only so much life to go around. It says, The only thing not rationed in Leningrad is death.

Marya Morevna listened to him with only one of her ears. In both marriage and war you must cut up the things people say like a cake, and eat only what you can stomach, she said to me later. Look who is so wise now, I said, and she answered, To have two husbands, I must be four times as clever.

I believe that Marya Morevna saw him come first, for Marya saw as a devil sees. I heard her cry out of the left side of her mouth as she sat by the window—and all of us saw General Frost step over the Neva. All of us held our breath and snapped our fingers to keep off his eye. His shoes were straw and rags; his beard was all hard snow. He had no hat, but his skull had chilblains, and his great blue-black hands held the double chain of his dogs, December and January. How they bite, with those teeth! Old Zvonok does not make up stories to frighten you. Ask anyone, and you will be told that Russia’s greatest military man is General Frost. He whips our enemies with ice and freezes their guns in their paws and sends out his dogs. On the breast of General Frost hang more medals than icicles. Should you ever be so lonely and unlucky as to be a soldier in Russia—may some unbusy god preserve and keep you!—you may see him. Hold your left hand over your right eye, put a lump of snow in your mouth, and crouch in a trench all night without sleeping, and you may spy him wandering through the drifts, laying his hand on German heads and turning their helmets to death masks.

Koschei looks long at his child. The girl takes her second breath, through her eyes. It makes no sound at all. “She has a name already, volchitsa, my love, my terrible wolf. She is my death. And I love her abjectly, as a father must.” Death, their daughter, who will never learn to speak, who will never need to speak, holds out her bloody arms, streaked white and silver with fluid. “I always die at the end,” he whispers, and he is afraid now, his hands shaking. “It is always like this. It is never easy.”

But Koschei the Deathless steps into his daughter’s embrace and holds her, gently, tenderly, proudly, for a moment, smoothing her wet hair with his hand before kissing her forehead as perfectly as any father has ever done. She opens her mouth and takes her third breath, wholly, fully, through her mouth, the last trickles of the water of her mother’s womb spilling from her lips. The force of her third breath drags Koschei’s eyelids down, down, down, until they droop, and fall like scrolls unfurling to the floor; and he is become his brother, the Tsar of Death, for a tiny silver moment no larger than the prick of a pin. He lifts his eyelids with one arm to see Marya Morevna one last time, lifting them over his daughter’s shoulders; and beneath the lids and lashes there is only light, more and endless light, silver as water, pouring out of him; and suddenly they are both gone and there is a bird in the room, a bird both like and unlike Marya’s firebird; and Marya’s belly is flat and firm as though she were never full of daughter, and she is not in bed, but standing in a corner of her house in Yaichka, in the dark, and all is grey and cold except the bird, the bird staring at her with a human face.

“Tscha! Death is not like that. The redistribution of worlds has made everything equal—magic and cantinas and Yelenas and basements and bread and silver, silver light. Equally dead, equally bound. You will live as you live anywhere. With difficulty, and grief. Yes, you are dead. And I and my family and everyone, always, forever. All dead, like stones. But what does it matter? You still have to go to work in the morning. You still have to live.”

The dust beneath her feet spangled in the evening light. She did not waver in her path, toward a place underground, down, down into the merciful dark, in a basement where a man with black curls flecked with starry silver would say her name like a confession; and in the place where their hands would touch, Marya Morevna could already see diamonds and black enamel swelling huge and gravid, yolk seeping from their skin like light.